Carolyn Biltoft, Ph.D.

Carolyn Biltoft was trained in global intellectual history (Princeton, 2010.) She is interested in the material and immaterial infrastructures of globalization, including how media and information systems alter finance, politics and culture locally and globally.

Carolyn Biltoft was trained in the world/global intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Princeton, 2010) Methodologically, her work fuses the tools of intellectual history, media history and theory, cultural studies and critical theory. She is interested in how the changing material and immaterial infrastructures of globalization emerged, developed and altered finance, politics and culturally local and globally. Her first book, A Violent Peace: Truth, Media and Power at the League of Nations (University of Chicago Press, 2021) demonstrates how the League of Nations constituted a global stage for the production and contestation of a wide range of truth claims in an era of mass media, propaganda and totalitarian political projects. Her other work has also focused on the concepts of modern myths and the question of belief and disbelief in an era of disinformation. 

Her current project is entitled, The Trouble with Avatars: Henri Bergson’s Digital Premonitions. The book claims that the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s theories of the self and consciousness can be interpreted as having anticipated many of the humanistic dilemmas of our own digital age. The book also offers a Bergsonion critique of AI and a scientific defense of humanistic inquiry.